When one reads Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (2011)—about a man revisiting his past after being bequeathed the diary of a school friend who committed suicide—one gets a flash of certainty, as though Barnes was confirming something you had always known. He made you see things you had been looking at all your life without really seeing. By voicing your deepest fears, which you thought were yours alone, he forced you to confront your humanity. When the narrator, Tony, talks about his apprehension that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature, you knew exactly what he meant, because after all, isn’t that your fear also? Was it only in Literature that real, true and important things happened? Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal—did they have meaning outside Literature the way they did inside it? Was there a narrative arc to your life, some point to it, or was it all mere junk to be discarded when you came to the end? In other words, do you really matter in the grand scheme of things?
Fourteen years later, this is a question that Barnes, 78, revisits in his latest novel Departure(s), but with an added sense of urgency because, being diagnosed with blood cancer, he says this is going to be his last book. He likens the diagnosis to life itself—both being “incurable but manageable”. In the book, he writes about two of his friends who dated in university, separated and then came together in a doomed marriage years later. He makes his friends’ relationship, and his own part in it, a meditation on memory, meaning, life and legacy. This is not the same Barnes of The Sense of an Ending. The scathing wit and ability to see the irony in life are still there. But somehow, it’s all a little jaded. It is like cynicism, or something resembling meaninglessness, has tipped the scale for Barnes and taken his Life far beyond the realm of Literature. Life is no longer a grand, sweeping story. It is merely something that happens to you while you are looking the other way. “Neither happiness nor misery are controllable,” he writes. “Joyfulness, pleasure, passionate interest—like their photographic negatives, sadness, grief and boredom—flow over us in waves. We can take precautionary measures, seeking to prolong the former and delay the latter, but these make only a minor difference.”
He says by writing this last book, in a small way, he is taking control of his fate and denying agency to death—an ever-present reality. In one sense, Departure(s) joins a long list of books that look at life through the prism of death. Non-fiction writers like Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture), Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air) and author Mitch Albom (Tuesdays With Morrie) have written on how to live life with joy, purpose and meaning when you come to the end of it. But really, it is the fiction writers who have poked and prodded at death, forcing it to give up its meaning. It is a recurring theme in the works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain, approached philosophically, sentimentally and even humorously. “I do not fear death,” wrote Twain. “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
Or take Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. His novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), is an intimate exploration of a man’s final days, and how facing your mortality shifts your perspective. Ivan Ilyich is a high-ranking judge in 19th century Russia. He is comfortably settled, well-respected and at the peak of his career. He has everything going for him, but when he loses his health, he realises that respectability is merely the fancy dress you wear to camouflage the emptiness within. He desperately fights death, scorning the hypocritical sympathy shown to him by his wife and daughter. The only person whose ministrations he welcomes is the butler’s assistant Gerassim, whose genuine compassion is presented as the antithesis to the falseness of his friends and family. In the final reckoning, Tolstoy posits, it is not your wealth or position that lends meaning to life; it is living it authentically, being true to yourself.
Tolstoy wrote the book after his conversion to Christianity in the 1870s, and it shows in the climax, where Ivan, after days of fighting his destiny, finds redemption and a clarity that only comes with death. “‘Where are you, pain?’ Ivan examines himself. He began to watch for it. ‘Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be. And death? Where is it?’ He searched for his former habitual fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death either. In place of death there was light. ‘So that’s what it is!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!’”
While Tolstoy is vague about the nature of this ‘light’ that is there in place of death, some like American musician and author Paul Harding have gone further in examining it. His Pulitzer-winning first novel Tinkers (2009) is about George Washington Crosby, a dying New England clock repairer. Surrounded by family, he starts hallucinating in his final days, his mind wandering to a childhood dominated by his tinker father Howard. As the clock ticks relentlessly toward his death, all the clocks of his past that he has repaired become a metaphor for the universe, to which we are all returned—the clock hands winded to the beginning—upon our death. “For is it not true that our universe is a mechanism consisting of celestial gears, spinning ball bearings, solar furnaces, all cooperating to return man... to that chosen hour we know of from the Bible as Before the Fall?” he writes.
Authors have spilt much ink tracing the contours of death and how it relates to life. For all its pain and pathos, life is still a privilege. As Harding says, “the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world….,” And in the final reckoning, the charm of living might lie in its central paradox: the more we solve its mystery, the more mysterious it becomes.